Currently one of the key areas in progress towards multilinguilisation of the Internet revolves around the complex issue of the domain name system (DNS) whish was originally developed using the ASCII character set, employing only Roman characters and a limited number of symbols. An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system. (Also read Geoff Huston article: Internationalizing the Internet) Read the full background at Multilinguism Wikipedia
Many software applications rely on validation routines to check the validity of domain names. By validation, I mean here to test the string submitted by the user and see if it matches a pre-defined pattern. A typical example are web forms that need to validate e-mail addresses. This is by new means a new issue. It first appeared with the introduction of the .info Top-Level Domain (TLD). more»
Wednesday's announcement by the Obama administration, that former Washington state governor Gary Locke has been nominated as the next Secretary of Commerce could be a good sign for Internet governance, and the continued globalization of the ICANN regime. The Chinese-American Locke brings key political capital and experience to the table. He is well respected within and has access to the most senior levels of the Chinese government... more»
Igor Schegolev, the Russian Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications spoke at the opening of the InfoCom 2008 exhibition in Moscow. Among other things, which made news (for example, that the Russian government will be implementing a free and open source based operating system on all computers in the Russian schools), he also made the following remarks - translated by me in English. more»
While Google is as secretive about its internal processes and systems as Apple is about product development, every now and then senior people post articles on the official Google blog and offer their thoughts on the development of the web. In the latest posting, two Google engineers, Alfred Spector and Franz Och, look at how search strategies will benefit from the faster computers, greater volumes of data and better algorithms we are likely to see in the next decade, speculating that "we could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognise the plot or the symbolism." more»
Ever sat at one of the VeriSign "State of the domain" meetings at any of the ICANN meetings? Or read their reports about countries with the greatest opportunity in domains? Almost without question you will learn that Japan is earmarked as the country with the greatest opportunity for growth in the domain market. They take into consideration important factors such as GDP of a country, internet population, and current domain registration levels... more»
The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of email addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send email messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses... There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications. more»
I have been thinking a lot lately on the topic of the free flow of information on the internet -- what kinds of tools are available now and in the future for governments (especially repressive ones) to control content, isolate their people and keep any contrary viewpoints censored. I had an interesting conversation with a Practice Lead from IFTF.org. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a California based independent, nonprofit research group with 40 years of experience in identifying emerging trends that will transform global society... Turns out they are quite concerned about the fragmentation and control of the Internet as well. But will it be an inevitability? more»
Gartner, the well known IT consulting company, has published a report on the new top level domains that will appear some time next year. The report totally misses the mark. In a pure US centric vision, it focuses on ".com" as the must-have TLD, totally overlooking the fact that a ".com" is mostly worthless e.g. in Germany, where ".de" is the TLD one must have to succeed locally... more»
ICANN is currently analyzing technical and policy implications regarding the introduction of Internationalized Top-Level Domains into the root. This is an important step in the continued evolution of the Internet by enabling language communities of the world that write non-Latin and extended Latin scripts to utilize their languages on the Internet... While the IDNC Working Group (IDNC) has made constructive progress on proposing a framework for the introduction of an initial set of IDN TLDs, the approach taken by the IDNC from a legal perspective is fundamentally flawed. more»
Here is a list of the most viewed news and blog postings that were featured on CircleID in 2007. Best wishes for 2008. more»
According to the latest figures released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising last year reached $23.4 billion... One of the issues, which isn’t discussed in the report, is one that is of special interest to brand rights holders; registration of domains containing variations of famous marks. ›››
By now, most companies have begun the process to understand how the introduction of new gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains) will impact their respective businesses. Some companies are considering submitting applications to operate their own branded gTLDs. Many others are focused on how to address the anticipated launch of new gTLDs defensively... ›››
.ORG, The Public Interest Registry, the premier domain where people turn to find credible information, get involved, fund causes and support advocacy, announces it is seeking Internet leaders to fill four (4) open seats on the .ORG Advisory Council. ›››
On July 29, the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and Public Interest Registry (PIR) sent out a joint letter to ICANN asking it to consider the interests of the end-users as core to its policies in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) implementation... As of today's date, August 21, 2008, we have yet to receive even an acknowledgement of receipt of our letter... ›››
Recently we teamed up with the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) to express our concern to ICANN that the rights and needs of end-users are taken into account in the discussion of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). ›››
DomainSponsor™, the domain monetization business of Oversee.net and organizing party of DOMAINfest Global, a premier conference for the domain industry, today announced the final DOMAINfest agenda, which features global experts who will cover all aspects of the domain industry. ›››
The conference agenda for the second annual DOMAINfest Global, taking place January 21-23, 2008 in Hollywood, CA, has been finalized. The agenda is available on the event's web site. ›››
On October 19, 2007, Sedo was awarded Ernst & Young's highly-coveted "Entrepreneur of the Year 2007" by a panel of industry and business experts; Sedo was one of five entrepreneurial organizations selected from more than 350 companies and 98 finalists across five categories. ›››
NeuStar announced today that it has deployed internationalized domain names (IDNs) for the Korean language in the .BIZ top-level Internet domain as of August 19, 2007. IDNs in .BIZ enable companies and for-profit organizations to register domain names in their languages of choice. ›››
The Public Interest Registry (PIR) is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexa A. S. Raad, an entrepreneurial technology executive, as its new CEO. The appointment is effective July 9, 2007. Ms. Raad brings more than 20 years of experience from the telecommunications, payment, and Internet sectors. ›››
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